Adulterous Affair Research Articles

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation. Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, on antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves - and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.

Shadows on the Hudson

With varying degrees of success, a group of Jewish friends have established new lives in New York. But then, after a dinner party, David Grein begins an adulterous affair with Anna, the daughter of the powerful Boris Amekrver, and the repercussions are enormous.

This Brief Tragedy: Unraveling the Todd-Dickinson Affair.

Dear Cousins, Called back, Emily. Why did Emily Dickinson write this cryptic note to her spinster cousins just before she died? In this arresting, even startling reevaluation of Dickinson's final years, Walsh presents the real story behind the adulterous affair that may have driven Emily Dickinson to suicide. Black-and-white photographs.

Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde: A Case Study in the Relation of Religion to Romanticism

In 1799 a small book called Lucinde was published in Berlin. Written by the brilliant young literary critic Friedrich Schlegel it celebrated his (adulterous) affair with Dorothea Veit, daughter of the eminent Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Though not widely read and still less widely understood the book provoked a considerable, and largely hostile, reaction among the reading public. It became to its generation what Lady Chatterley's Lover was to a more recent age: the quintessential embodiment of an obscene book. The author's mother gave utterance to the popular consensus when she wrote that ‘through his novel Fritz has shown himself to me as one who has no religion and no good principles’.

A Unified Sensibility: A Study of Henry James's The Ambassadors and Its Scenario (review)

Jin Ohsima. A Unified Sensibility: A Study of Henry James's The Ambassadors and Its Scenario. Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982. 120pp. In A Unified Sensibility, Jin Ohsima sets himself the task of exploring the disparities in artistic and moral vision between Henry James's "scenario" for The Ambassadors and the rich fulfiUment of the novel. Mr. Ohsima's often searching though decidedly unconventional study espouses the thesis that, under the pressure of creation and a growing distrust of European refinement , James fundamentally altered his concept of his protagonist, Lambert Strether, from a character who was to develop an almost unrestricted freedom and a large tolerance for the "animal in man" to one whose conscience led him to redefine experience in "supersensual" or spiritual terms. Mr. Ohsima further maintains that Strether's evolution into a man of fastidious conscience compelled James to make radical adjustments of his original assumptions about most of his characters and of his narrative strategies. Thus, the seemingly trivial change that Strether's male confidant undergoes from the "Waymark" of the scenario to the "Waymarsh" of the novel reveals to Mr. Ohsima deep changes in the character's function. Moreover, Mamie and Jim Pocock assume new roles, and Maria Gostrey takes on an almost new identity from a reminiscence of Henrietta Stackpole to a wise and witty guide through the mazes of Europe. Most drastically, however, Madame de Vionnet turns from an enchanting woman to an untrustworthy enchantress, and Chad, pictured in the scenario as an engaging cosmopolite, becomes a polished and nefarious schemer. In justifying his undertaking, Mr. Ohsima sets out to correct critics like F. O. Matthiessen who, he believes , have misread The Ambassadors under the mistaken notion that the scenario fully explains the novel. What Professor Ohsima proposes is that two different Strethers and two opposed definitions of "life" emerge from an examination of what James called his Project of Novel and The Ambassadors. The early Strether, the argument runs, is less inhibited by a Puritan conscience from responding to Europe's sensuous charms. Not appalled by the immorality he encounters, he absorbs the lesson of Europe so sympathetically that he can freely reject the unimaginative and prudish outlooks of Mrs. Newsome and WooUett. In contrast to this free spirit, the later Strether is troubled by the appeal of a Paris at once opulent in its beauty and undeterred by insular moralities . He escapes his dilemma, in Mr. Ohsima's view, by delusively converting Paris into an imaginary world where aesthetic and moral sensibilities exist in harmony. Strether thus comforts himself with two illusions: that Chad's refinement from a crude provincial to an agreeable Parisian has entailed no compromise with WooUett virtues and that Chad's close relations with the woman who remade him is therefore a "virtuous attachment." Mr. Ohsima contends that, given their opposed natures, James's heroes react differently when they discover Chad and Madame de Vionnet linked in an adulterous affair; the Strether of The Ambassadors confronts his romantic innocence with tragic clarity and a sense of defeat whereas the protagonist of the scenario takes his disillusionment as an almost necessary step in his education. With more symmetry than persuasiveness , Mr. Ohsima derives two starkly different definitions of "Uving" from the two documents; he argues that the original Strether conceives of life as immersion in and acceptance of reality while his later counterpart heightens "Ufe" into something idealized, aesthetic, and purged of physical grossness. Mr. Ohsima sees James's fictional hero as so transparently eager to be deluded that Little Bilham, Madame de Vionnet , and, most notoriously, Chad have little trouble in feeding him what he wants to believe; even Maria Gostrey respects his delusion and, except for a few hints to the contrary, aUows him to spin fanciful theories. This perhaps acceptable interpretation of Strether as the dupe of his own imagination leads Mr. Ohsima into some of his most daring and reckless speculations. Maintaining that James degraded Chad from the pleasant young man of the scenarVolume VI 69 Number 1 The Henry James Review Fall, 1984 io to an adventurer seeking expanded opportunities for sexual license in Europe, Mr. Ohsima suggests that Chad dislikes Strether and...

The "Shipman's Tale" and the Fabliaux

Of all the traditions that Chaucer drew upon while assembling the Canterbury Tales, one of the most influential was that of the fabliaux, the short bawdy tales in verse that flourished in thirteenth-century France. The offered not only a number of skillfully worked out narratives but also a set of well-tested conventions of subject and style whose spirit Chaucer could adopt even when he found his specific story material elsewhere.1 He exploited this model in various ways: both by emphasizing the qualities that set these tales apart from other contemporary genres, and by enlarging the sphere of the fabliau by incorporating poetic material of very different sorts within the stories of adulterous intrigue. In one instance, however, the tale now assigned to the Shipman, the relationship to the is particularly problematic. This tale too is quite plainly modeled on its predecessors; so closely, in fact, that J. W. Spargo, in the best-known study of its analogues, judged it to be a verbatim translation from a French fabliau that has since been lost.2 It shares the most common theme of the French tales, the story of a cuckold and a seducer, and it is the only one of Chaucer's fabliaux that is actually set in France. But the Shipman's Tale departs from the conventions of the genre in a great many ways that Spargo did not consider, and while Chaucer's use of the in this poem is evident, it does not follow the pattern of any of his other tales. The very texture of the poem is different from what one expects of a ribald story. It has none of the accustomed bawdiness of the other fabliaux, and the adulterous affair is nearly smothered by details in the lives of the characters completely extraneous to the plot. Its most striking qualities are a pervasive verbal humor of a sort that does not occur in the French fabliaux, and a structure in which the commercialization of sexual dealings, not the conventional triumph of one character over another, seems to be the major point. It is also unlike all of Chaucer's other comic tales, therefore, in that it is not well suited for a satire of another pilgrim;

Felix Holt as Classic Tragedy

T1HE UNPOPULARITY of Felix Holt, the Radical has usually, and with some justice, been attributed to the intricate legal plot, the uncongenial political background, and the dramatic deficiency of Felix as an apostle of social reform. Praise of the novel has been limited mainly to those portions involving Mrs. Transome and her son Harold, the progeny of an adulterous affair with the family lawyer Jermyn. What has never received sufficient attention is that the characterization and story of Mrs. Transome and Harold (as distinct from the rather stiffly abrasive romance of Felix and Esther Lyon) are no less experimental than the law and politics, and perhaps more successful in execution. There seems good reason to believe that the political material was not a part of George Eliot's original design and was introduced some time after she had started the novel.' A little over a month before she recorded in her journal having begun what was to be Felix Holt,5 she had been at work on the first version of her blank verse tragedy The Spanish Gipsy. On February 21, 1865 she was into the fourth act when George Henry Lewes took the MS away from her, precisely because it was in that stage of Creation or 'Werden,' in which the idea of the characters predominates over the incarnation,3 That her interest in tragedy, especially the Greek, continued during the following months is indicated by her reading list for May 10: 'Aeschylus, Theatre of the Greeks, Klein's Hist. of the Drama, etc. (Journal). And on June 15 she noted, Read again Aristotle's Poetics, with fresh admiration. On the whole, evidence suggcsts that she meant Felix Holt to conform in